I don't think that your plants have mosaic. I don't see the patterned leaves or yellow leaf veins. I think that your plants just are old and maybe filled up their containers, and the roots had no where else to go, and so the bottom leaves are dropping so the roots that are there can support the leaves that are new. How big are the containers, and how many plants do you have in each? How long have they been growing? Has it been cooler, or warmer lately? Wetter or drier than usual? I haven't grown a lot of vegs in containers, but of the cukes I have in the ground the oldest leaves on the slicer are getting not yellow but sort of dried looking, and it is cooler so the production is dropping a bit. I expect this to continue until frost. The pickler was a "bush" variety, and it seems to have just reached a stopping point and is kind of giving up. That's okay, I have enough pickles. Not sure about the brown flowers. There are some mildews that attack cucumbers, but you don't have any of the leaf symptoms. (The leaves would get more and more spotty-brown, and you could see the spore cases on the underneath side) Did you let them get a bit too dry once, and the those flowers aborted? That can happen. If it got really dry for a long time, then the roots can get damaged and the plant can't really recover that well from that. Seems like you would have more crispy leaf damage in that case. Really though, cukes don't seem to last forever, like greenman said. Did you get a good harvest? I could see you still had a cuke on your plant.

They like their water (and mine (zone 6) didn't set fruit, or produced misshapen fruit, if soil was on dry side). They like lots of compost on top of soil, plus lots of water. I'm a beginner, so I resorted to the extreme and gave them a Tablespoon triple phosphate to kick them into gear. Check w/seed company on how much fertilizer to give. Did I mention that they like a steady supply of water. I grow the chinese kind, long and spiny and delicious. Not waxy, but thin skinned. Great snack when working in garden. Aaaah, summer....... Also grew "lemon," but they were disappointing: poor yield (drought) and not nearly as tasty, but fun to look at, pretty.

It's normal for males to dominate before females start to bloom. Even then you will see pretty much one female to every ten males. To the poster who thinks his male flowers are dying off: all pumpkin flowers bloom for only a few hours every morning before they die off. As for not cutting the male flowers, I disagree. I've been growing pumpkins going on ten years now and if there are no female flowers to pollinate, then I will cut the male flowers just before they start to shrivel. I've yet to get a diseased plant doing this. I cut the male flowers because they are delicious to eat. So if you don't get pumpkins, you can enjoy cooking and eating the male flowers throughout the growing season. I cut off the stem, gently rinse them under cold water and saute them after dredging through a thin whole-wheat pancake batter - yum! BTW. I should mention that pumpkins are very difficult to hand pollinate. You'r e better off putting out bee loving flowers early in the season in order to get your location established on the honey bees routes. Ants do a pretty good job also, so if you see ants around your pumpkin vines, then do not try to exterminate them. If you do want to hand pollinate, then use a very soft artists brush and lightly stroke the pistol of a male plant (you should not see tons of pollen - in this case a little is too much), then lightly stroke the stamen of the female plant (again a little is too much). Even then you are not likely to succeed with hand pollination.

Most seedless cucumbers do not need a pollinator. Some all-female varieties will set fruit without pollination. They will then be seedless. If pollinated, they will have seeds, but the cukes will still be good. Examples include the gherkin Cool Breeze and the Middle Eastern type Diva. A few zucchini varieties, such as Greyzini, will also set fruit without pollination, and those fruits will be seedless. After the insects and male blossoms come out, fruits will have seeds. Some (expensive) greenhouse varieties of cucumbers set nice, mild seedless fruit without pollinatin but are inferior when pollinated. Therefore, these varieties are not grown in the garden. Other all female varieties of cucumber need a pollinator to set fruit, but the fruit will have seeds. Examples include Orient Express and (I think) Sweeter Yet. Commercial growers like all-female varieties because of their productiveness. They are typically sold with a pollinator variety included in the packet. If not, responsible seed houses will note that they should be planted alonside another cucumber variety. The seedless watermelon analogy doesn't exactly fit, because breeders have not, to my knowledge, developed an all-female watermelon which will set fruit without pollination. Seedless watermelon varieties have an unusual number of chromosomes and cannot set fruit by themselves. They must be pollinated by a "normal" watermelon variety.